Ten four-bay NAS boxes

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Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ V2

As far as grey metal boxes go, Netgear has crammed a lot of features into this one. The NV+ has both USB 2.0 on the front and USB 3.0 around back as well as a Marvell 1.6GHz CPU with 256MB of RAM inside. This 2TB model came with two Hitachi 1TB HDS721010 disks and achieved scores in the 60-70MB/s range under Crystal DiskMark.

The web accessible user interface is well designed and very straighforward to use. This makes it an easy device to manage, no matter if you're just creating a backup task, setting rules for an individual user or hosting your own personal website. An unpopulated model comes in at well under £300 – half this price if you shop around on-line – and given its flexibility and user friendliness, despite having only one Ethernet port, I'd still be inclined to choose this model over the D-Link DNS-345.

QNAP TS-419P II

QNAP’s TS-419P II is a very capable high-end NAS box that brings with it such things as front loading hotswappable drives and dual eSATA ports. Both USB 2.0 and 3.0 are also at this party as well as an LCD screen to convey the system status. Controlling this lot is a 2.0GHz Marvell 88F6282 chip with 512MB of DDR3, a combination that is capable of pushing data through the twin LAN ports between 60-70MB/s.

It’s not the fastest of systems, but the software feature list is too extensive to cover, suffice to say, that you won’t be disappointed with what it has to offer and Mac users will benefit from QNAP's support of Apple's HFS+ format on external drives.